Economist whose life reflected torrid times

AT THE annual dinner last month in Canberra's University House
in honour of the late H.W. (Heinz) Arndt (1915-2002), some 22 of
his old friends and colleagues entertained each other with
anecdotes about this quirky and charming intellectual and
economist.

Ross Garnaut  economist, ambassador, banker and eloquent
policy wonk  told the story about how Heinz had once
complained to him that there were not enough Australians in the
school of economics at the ANU.

"Wait a minute!" said Garnaut. He rattled off a list of young
Australians in the school. As it happened, they all had Chinese
names. "I mean real Australians," Arndt said. "They are as much
real Australians as you are," was Garnaut's riposte. Arndt was
delighted. He immediately withdrew his complaint.

Arndt was born German (partly of Polish and Jewish descent),
grew up in the vanished Prussian city of Breslau (now Wroclaw in
Poland) and Constantinople (now Istanbul), was educated at Oxford
and London, interned as an enemy alien in Quebec, found his first
employment in the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and
arrived in Australia in 1946. The only honour he accepted during
the following momentous 55 years (he died in May 2002) was a
Bintang from Indonesia. (He declined Australian honours.)

Like many strong personalities, he was both loved and condemned.
In any major Asian city, it is easy to meet officials or academics
who recall with pleasure the intellectual debt they owe him. But it
is not hard to come across his critics. One indicator is his
various resignations on principle. Although he had given the
mould-breaking Chifley Memorial Lecture in 1956, he resigned from
the Labor Party in 1971 over what he saw as its pro-communist
foreign policy. In 1993 he resigned from the board of
Quadrant over what he saw as its then reactionary and
protectionist economic policy. In 1996 he resigned from the Academy
of Social Sciences over what he saw as its biases.

It was a life that cried out for a biography. The three authors
of Arndt's Story. The Life of an Australian Economist all
wrote with fresh memories of their friend and colleague, and with a
sense of loss.

Selwyn Cornish covers the first 20 years of Arndt's career in
Australia  as teacher, public intellectual and policy
adviser. Cornish has written biographical studies on several
economists including John Maynard Keynes, Roland Wilson and most
recently Lyndhurst Giblin, Douglas Copland and James Brigden in the
co-authored Giblin's Platoon. He is now writing the
History of the Reserve Bank of Australia 1975-2000.

Peter Drake, the founding vice-chancellor of the Australian
Catholic University and an expert on monetary systems and financial
development (his most recent book is Currency, Credit and
Commerce: Early Growth in Southeast Asia) has written the
chapters that may be called "Arndt of Asia"  that is, Arndt
the adviser and consultant to the governments of India, Malaya and
Singapore but, above all, Indonesia.

My modest contribution is the opening chapters on Arndt as a
schoolboy in Germany, a student in Oxford and the London School of
Economics, an internee in Canada, and an emerging economist in
Chatham House, London. I also track his development from free trade
liberal to communist fellow traveller to social democrat. (His full
circle back to a free trade liberal is covered in the Cornish and
Drake chapters.) Arndt was my co-editor of Quadrant for many
years.

Arndt's daughter, Bettina  columnist, psychologist, and
sex therapist whose books range from her youthful Guide to
Lovemaking (1982) to her mature Taking Sides (2004)
 has written a moving prelude "HWA  the man and his
marriage" and a postlude "Chez Arndt" about their family life.

Such a wide-ranging biographical study, written under the
pressure of an early deadline, involved exploratory discussions
with many of Arndt's friends and colleagues such as Helen Hughes,
Max Corden, Bob Scott, Joan Butlin, Peter and Lena Karmel, Hal
Hill, Karen McVicker and Malcolm Treadgold. Arndt's brother Walter,
the famous translator of Goethe, Pushkin and Rilke, was an
invaluable source of information about the Breslau childhood and
youth.

The huge archive of Arndt's papers in the National Library,
Canberra  not to mention in the London School of Economics,
Lincoln College, Oxford, and Chatham House, London  were also
essential sources.

So were Arndt's several memoirs, diaries, correspondence and
perhaps above all his many books and monographs from The
Economic Lessons of the Nineteen-Thirties published in 1944, to
Globalisation in 1998 or The Importance of Money in
2001, the year before he died at the age of 87.

Ross Garnaut launched Arndt's Story to a packed Finkel
Lecture Theatre in Canberra following the annual H.W. Arndt Lecture
given this year by Max Corden of Melbourne University.

The publishers (Asia Pacific Press, Canberra, and the Institute
of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore) see the book as timely. It
is not a psycho-biography. It does answer the question what made
Arndt tick. But the authors hope that it will commemorate a
remarkable scholar, intellectual and human being who made a
liberating dint in the history of Australia.

Peter Coleman is a former NSW Liberal opposition leader and
former federal member for Wentworth.